.. Is it indisputable that several aesthetic declarations of our French comrades (the Cubists) display a sort of masked academicism. It is not, indeed, a return to the Academy to declare that the subject, in painting, has a perfectly insignificant value?... To paint from the posing model as an absurdity, and an act of mental cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical and cubic forms..
Umberto BoccioniRelated topics
absurdity academicism academy act aesthetic cowardice cubic display french linear mental model painting paint picture posing return several sort subject valueRelated quotes
I have made the complete return [from imagination] to nature, and nature is, as we all know, primarily an intellectual idea. I am satisfied that painting also is like nature, an intellectual idea, and that the laws of nature as presented to the mind through the eye and the eye is the painter's first and last vehicle are the means of transport to the real mode of thought: the only legitimate source of aesthetic experience for the intelligent painter.
Marsden Hartley
I begin [a painting] from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it's not altogether arbitrary what one begins with.... certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that 'I am going to paint something I know' by 'through the act of painting I'm going to find out exactly how I feel.
Robert Motherwell
Perfect knowledge of the space an object should occupy in a picture, and of the space that separates one object from another, establishes a new astronomy of things attached to our planet by the magic law of gravity. Canons of the Metaphysical aesthetic lie in the minutely-accurate and precisely-estimated use of surfaces and volumes.. ..We are building in paint a new Metaphysical psychology of things.
Giorgio de Chirico
The new masters paint a subject as they please,
And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition
For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ,
The earth is a planet among galaxies.
Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract
Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts
Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe
In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner
Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.
Randall Jarrell
Pop Art is the use of commercial art as a subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it – everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody [in America, mainly in New York, 1950s] was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; and apparently they didn't hate that enough either.
Roy Lichtenstein
